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Page 20 august 7,2011 StarNews www.starnewsga.com
YAHM front page 15
major leaders in the Philadelphia aristoc
racy who were meeting no more than
blocks away at an early Congress repre
senting all the colonies. A group of men
who were interested in forming an anti
slavery society had
gathered to discuss
Paine’s pamphlet,
“African Slavery in
America”. The well-
dressed and well-
connected group had
pictured Paine as one
of them, another aris
tocratic intellectual,
not the common man
dressed in plain Quaker clothes that stood
before them.
Slavery was the topic but, as it turned
out, not the only one. While the mass of
artisans, mechanics, day laborers and
many small farmers were ready to imme
diately take steps toward independence,
many of the members of the colonial aris
tocracy were not ready to follow Paine
down the road to independence. They
feared independence would bring an end
SCOTT from page 15
every class night and over the weekend.
She only gave you credit for problems you
got the correct answer to, and she didn’t
grade on the curve. At random each day
she had some of us put homework prob
lems on the blackboard. (Yes, it was black
and you wrote on it with chalk.)
Almost designing a bridge correctly, she
, said, isn’t good enough. How you become
capable of getting correct answers in the
real world where it counts is learning how
to do it in school. She built your self
esteem by requiring that your achieve
ments entitle you to respect yourself. My
only criticism of her is that she didn’t
require us to read the proofs in our text
books, which I found to be very useful.
It probably will not surprise you that the
only people who signed up for her classes
were students who wanted to really leam
math. None of my other teachers helped
me later in my life as much as she did.
PAK from page 15
over any other consideration. The idea of
society bound by contract may sound too
cold and calculative to some of those of the
Confucian tradition. But the social contract
is the basic fabric of modem society. It is a
part of the capitalistic economy that pro
duced prosperity worldwide.
Those who cling to the closed commu
nity of ethnicity expect extended family
members - grandfathers and grandmothers,
uncles and aunts - to honor the old
Confucian code and bestow permanent
favors to nephews, nieces and cousins. But
those who learned American pragmatism
moved forward beyond this dictum of
Confucianism. They hold individualism
close to their heart and disdain dependency
on others, including family member. They
became Americans of Korean origin.
The cultural clash produces such sarcas
tic remarks as, “Is money thicker than
blood?” Against the challenge, the
Americans by choice would respond,
“Don’t waste your time trying to compare
apples and oranges. They don’t compare
even in today’s Korea.”
How this argument is going to play out
in the end will be interesting to watch.
to the rule of the upper classes in America
and said it sounded to them like mob rule
and anarchy. In any case, many of them
owed allegiance to England as much of
their businesses and trade, not only with
England but France and Germany,
depended on the
Monarchy’s largess.
They reasoned it was
a better bet to bear
the tyranny of the
British government
than to risk their
property and posi
tions on a democratic
upheaval in America.
When Paine
addressed the issues of commerce and
how the English did not permit the colo
nies to manufacture products, only to sell
the raw materials (furs for hats, iron to be
worked into finished forms, for example),
Governor Morris of New York had
stomped out of the room mumbling “tre
ason” under his breath. Paine had put it
plainly as he always did. He stood, and the
rationale poured from his heart. He was an
Englishman and knew how duplicitous the
monarchy could be.
The Boston harbor had been sealed off,
warships all around, troops on the ground,
nothing in or out, and held for ransom to
avenge the tea tossed in there. Make no
mistake folks, this was not about the tax.
The colonists had said plainly they would
gladly have paid the tax were they being
represented in Parliament and a fair por
tion of the money coming back to their
own government, a government they were
forbidden to have. It was about consent.
The current Tea Party uses their name to
suggest that our government is as illegiti
mate as the unelected English Monarchy
and implies there is something fundamen
tally wrong with taxes themselves. In
Paine’s long list of “abuses and usurpa
tions” contained in the Declaration of
Independence, taxes are not even men
tioned until the 17 th item, and then, not as
a complaint about taxes, but about con
sent. No question this was about freedom
and an American government to pass laws
of their own not passed across an ocean by
people who had no idea or cared about
their needs and values.
These men were not anarchists; they
wanted to pass laws, not repeakhem. They
were not against government; they wanted
government by consent of the people as
Lincoln so eloquently pointed out “four
score and seven” years later. It had started
as a desire to be represented in the English
Parliament. After all these people were, in
their minds, still Englishmen.
But as they were coldly and ruthlessly
rebuffed by King George, the cry for a
government of their own grew louder and
louder as Paine’s Common Sense spread
throughout the colonies. The colonists
were about to test the Monarchy’s heavy,
tyrannical hand.
Next month: Part 3, the final column.
Common Sense spreads.
War!
Paine writes “The Crises” and joins
Washington at Valley Forge.
Paine and Franklin write the
Pennsylvania Constitution.
Paine begins to be pushed aside.
I invite your comments.
Ilisten65 @yahoo. com
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These men were not
anarchists; they wanted to
pass laws, not repeal them.
They were not against
government; they
wanted government by
consent of the people ...
